What I Want Comes with a Price
by Pollux Unbound
Summary: "You said that you'd die for me, then you must live for me too." Ichigo says. They're just two pieces of an irreconcilable whole but sometimes, somehow, souls do collide and hearts do become one. GrimmIchi IchiGrimm Oneshot


**Disclaimer**: I do not own Bleach because some genius whose name is Kubo Tite beat me into owning it.

**Warning**: This is the first time I'm writing angst GrimmIchi and I bet you ten million yen this sucks. Clear your bank accounts now if you must.

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Someday, someone's gonna come to you and change your life. Enough said, but maybe not enough, considering what's being demonstrated, which is plainly too much. Grimmjow Jaggerjack changed his life; yeah, that's been made repeatedly clear to him every once in a while in approximately every after two hours. Grimmjow Jaggerjack altered him from head to toe. Now that one's quite unlooked for, because the proverbial statement up there only accounts for the change of life and not of one's self. He receives all these in silence, and more than anything, he takes each and every bout. The man is made of pure force, has all the power to wrap him in his bare fingers, and is capable of making destiny for a man—a boy, him, in particular; Kurosaki Ichigo.

It hangs imminent and never falters; this dark luster of deep longing, which invariably hushes the activities of his brain. If you look back at it, into the seemingly unfathomably distant past, Ichigo was the one who did all those life-transforming triggers. He was the one who rescued this Espada hence he shouldn't be the one enduring this dreadfully fixed feeling of having an un-payable debt.

And Grimmjow Jaggerjack is sentenced to death.

He accepted this sentence with head held up high as he marched towards Seretei. A prisoner marshaled for his final incarceration to await his impending doom, that's how low he has sunk.

Only one soul picks up the trouble to visit him.

The Chamber of Repentance reeks of one thing only; death.

"You're here again, Strawberry?" The Espada asks.

Ichigo does not answer. It puzzles him, as much as it hurts him, to witness such a grand serenity exercised within these four walls, where everything seems to decompose into formless darkness. Here in a roomful of dead echoes, it strikes him that Grimmjow Jaggerjack is indeed dead.

They sit there in an awfully wretched silence, each growing more receptive to defeat in each passing second. The Espada speaks again,

"Survival is a continuous negotiation; it's _that_ unfair. Frankly, I've resigned from keeping my head above the water. I'm tired of it all. So if you only come here to inspire what narrow hope I have left to bind me to life, you may leave now."

"Nothing like that, Grimmjow. You were—I'm sorry—I never knew you. I still don't. I want to _know_ you, but I guess it's too late. I—if I had known that all my efforts' fruit would amount to a few weeks' extension of your life, I would have ran my Zanpokotou through you, instead of delivering you in here, to a more anguishing form of death. I'm living by that mistake, and I'm sure this means a lifetime of travail for me. Still, I crave for your forgiveness… but who _are_ you?" Ichigo asks.

Without a doubt, he has fallen in love with him, which, it seems, has all the coincidental nature of getting born. Secretly he weeps, he weeps not because soon all will come to an end the moment this man steps onto the harbor of Soukyoku, but because such love is ever was. He shouldn't have _looked_ at him; he should only have seen him.

"Soon I'll be nothing more than a mound of fresh soil."

Ichigo looks away, his heart breaking away from its organic hold to lament desolately. What is it now that's preventing his tears from virtually falling? only a tide of nothingness. In a heartbeat, there will be nothing left of this man, his love. Once it's over, he thinks, either his heart would break or cease to care. And to think that of late, he has been wondering if Grimmjow is capable of love.

Perhaps he will never know.

"Grimmjow, stop, please. All the time you've been here the only thing you've given me is sorrow. And my sorrow will not secure your return. You're as good as gone, as good as dead, and it kills me too. I know not what manner of misery is plunging in great waves across your mind, but I am trying to understand and feel it in an attempt to assure you that what I'm bearing now is infinitely more than remorse. You should, at least, acknowledge that." There is stench of wreckage in Ichigo's voice, against which he is rebelling. He tries to appear composed, only to very little avail.

"What would you know? I'm a hundred years old while you never had one shadow of substantial grief in your entire life save, perhaps, those near death experiences you and your friends suffered by our hands…but those are nothing. I'm not saying you should suffer the same and I do appreciate your intentions of knowing who I am. But, however that may be, who are you to demand anything from me?" He knows how close to breaking the vessel that holds his life. He has loved life and dreaded death, of course, for in the end, he's only human.

It's eternity in an hour. He never will understand Grimmjow Jaggerjack, not even in the last. And for love to end where it begins only introduces him to a new circle of torment. This is the end, Ichigo thinks.

"When something disappears, it is remembered not as an actuality but something else—something that makes us inhabit partly in the past for the reason that one can never take pieces of the past with him. Having said that, I will take you with me, if only in my mind." Ichigo says. It is little enough, as opposed to the scope of his heart's contents, yet too much perhaps, coming from his mouth.

"So this is it? The closing of a book that will never be read again, huh?" Grimmjow asks, as if ravaged by every sort of emotion save despair.

"Yes."

They have spoken words neither would forget, and both know they cannot part now without transforming both of them forever.

Ichigo stands up at last, not exposing the fact that he would resort to the most reckless of actions on the chance of transporting Grimmjow to elsewhere, where his execution is but a distant threat. He continues to advance determinedly from the other with his flesh as thirsty for absolution as the world is for transformation.

He stops his pace to stare at the vastness of the ruin before him, and he speaks,

"You had always loved crossing swords with me. There was even a time when you said you'd fight me to death to prove who was stronger."

Grimmjow stares at him, wondering if the past cannot return. He has loved being challenged, and more than anything he loves the heat of the battle, battle against his one true nemesis.

"Yes. If it is by your hands that I am to end, death I shall not resist, if only by you, you alone." Grimmjow recites and all he is is a bundle of voices, not a soul, nor a body.

"Then you have said, and are saying, you'd die for _me_."

Silence issues forth from some mysterious depth that's greater than the pure unknown. Ichigo has ventured into something that shouldn't be even thought of, even known. It is desperation. No, it's the duplicity of beliefs; acceptance and defiance. But it's something else; it's hope. It's what love can do, after all.

"Yes."

Ichigo sighs before speaking slowly and with difficulty,

"Can you escape from here?"

Grimmjow looks up at him as if he has just heard something that invalidates the whole of their conversation. "From death, you mean? Let's see, from what I've heard, the Soukyoku has the power of one million Zanpakotou. No, not even the greatest of warriors could chop it down. This is a barren dead end, Ichigo. "

It is as though he hears his name for the first time. As powerless as they both are to what fate has served them, Ichigo speaks up, undeterred, even as he's clearly falling headlong into a black pit of the most painful deliverance.

"You said that you'd _die_ for me," he pauses as his body and voice stand in complete opposition to each other, like two battling waves, and he continues with a request that's long past its final submission, his eyes bearing down on his archrival's, "then you must _live_ for me too."

**END**

**A/N: **Plot (if this indeed has a goddamn plot) is inspired by the song 'Cat and Mouse' by the Red Jumpsuit Apparatus.


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